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The license has not been activated on the machine. The full version of the plug-in will not render without doing this first. See License Management.

Spotmask render elements don’t show up in the ‘Add Render Element’ list¶

The list only shows render elements the renderer can use. If your active renderer is not compatible they will not show up at all. Switch to NVIDIA mental ray as your current renderer and they will appear.

3ds Max generates no render elements at all even though they are active in the render elements dialog¶

3ds Max does not generate render elements when you use the ‘Render Last’ or ‘Render Iterative’ option. This is by design. This will also not save your rendered files regardless of what you specified during setup.

Normal production rendering will create all render elements and save files as expected.

This happens when you’re using the 16 bit frame buffer in mental ray. That frame buffer will always clamp the render data into the visible color range, discarding most of the relevant information. Please make sure you are using the 32 bit frame buffer to receive correct results.

I’m looking at the render element in my image viewer and it looks weird¶

There are many cases where the rendered image doesn’t look as the user might intuitively expect even though it works perfectly fine. Many image viewers can’t handle colors outside of the exprected visible range (0.0 - 1.0) at all and will just draw those pixels black or return error messages. They can still be used fine for their intended purpose. Image viewers understandably just stumble over the challenge to display for example a red that’s a hundred times redder than the reddest red.

Make sure you are not rendering the render elemnt with filtering enabled. Anti-aliasing that smooths visual data can cause great problems when it’s applied to raw data used for calcuations during compositing. See the section about anti-aliasing for details.